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Dancing About Architecture	By : mcee Category: > Spike(William)/Xander > Spike(William)/Xander Views: 4638 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS), nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-Dancing About Architecture
- 2-2/?
- 3-3/?
- 4-4/?
- 5-5/?
- 6-6/?
- 7-7/?
- 8-8/?
- 9-9/?
- 10-10/?
- 11-11/?
- 12-12/?
- 7
- 8
- 9
I stepped inside my hotel room and closed the door behind me with a discreet click of its lock. I stood there dejectedly, against the door in the dark, for what seemed like a small eternity. I dropped my camera bag to the ground, gently, and made my way towards what I could see of the bed. It's not that it was that dark; I just wasn't seeing anything.

I couldn't remember feeling this bad about myself since my painful teenage years. The feeling was at once unsettling and oddly familiar.

There were two issues battling for the fore. First, that I had screwed up. Monumentally sabotaged my own chances at something that might have been really, *really* good with the right amount of work. Secondly, the reason itself why I had screwed up. Spike had a child. With a perfectly nice woman who seemed to like him making time with guys. Or maybe just with me. Either way, I wasn't too sure why this was bothering me so, but it most definitely was.

Why? Because he had moved on and gotten more of a life than me? Because he had outplayed me in the grown-up game? Any reason that came to my mind seemed ridiculous, and I became less and less impressed with my earlier actions.

Had I reacted that way simply because of timing? Had we met Liz before dinner, would I have had acted differently? And why had I acted that way in the first place? Because I thought I knew everything about William after a three-hour dinner spent talking about anything but ourselves?

Argh, so many questions, all of which only made me more annoyed at myself as I lay there wide awake, much too sober for my taste. Truth is, I knew the answer to most of those questions, and I only really needed to talk to him. I wasn't sure what I'd say, or even what I really wanted from him at this point, but I needed to let him know whatever had happened, it wasn't him. It might've been me on an overload of stimuli. Might have been that dinner had been too perfect, that the kiss had been too good, that his ex-wife was too beautiful and too Sarah and his little boy was too much like him and everything had looked too perfect without me in it.

Might have been all that. Might have been that I had felt like I was sixteen again, pining after the unattainable, the too perfect, the ideal. Took me years to convince myself I was good enough for the elite, why not, and once I had figured it out, they were fresh out of perfection.

But I wasn't asking for best in show - I just wanted another shot with Spike.

I was going to pat myself on the back and call, perhaps only to have him send me off back to California without much of a second thought for the guy who bailed on a divorced dad. My problem was that I had to stop thinking of him as Spike 'from back home', good ol' vamp, all-around bad guy, who had happened to get a make-over. It was clear to me by now that very little of what I knew of that Spike remained in the updated version - and that changed everything. I had to accept that he had attachments, a new history, decisions made that hadn't included things I knew about. Sunnydale wasn't only a continent away for him, but a whole lifetime away, and while I had successfully distanced myself from my hometown as well throughout the years, I'd remained the same old guy with the inappropriate sense of humour. I had my Sarah, Spike had his. Spike had a little more, but that I could deal with if I was going to deal with any of it at all.

The absurdity of the situation hit me, and I laughed listlessly in the dark. It took a certain talent to go from reunion to kiss to disaster in a matter of hours.

This would've been hilarious had it not been so fucking aggravating.

I toed off my shoes and let them fall to the carpet, sighing explicitly loud in the otherwise silent room. I threw both arms out on each side of me and stared hard at the pealing plaster of the ceiling above me.

Then I remembered my earlier freak-out and almost fell off the bed trying to reach the phone book in the nightstand. I fished it out and sat up, flipping the thing open on my lap. Sawyer. Sawyer. Could be listed. Just because mopey-pants Sarah said it wouldn't... I pawed at the thin pages, looking through the S's and momentarily forgetting my alphabet. Ah! Sawyer. Now, William. W. My finger ran down the column of fine print, past the D's and the M's and the R's and all the others letters that came before W, to finally find three names of interest: two W's, one William. The William fellow lived on 10th, and the two others on 45th and 58th.

I blinked, looked at the phone one the nightstand, then flopped down on my back, grinning and feeling absurdly pleased with myself suddenly. Yay, me. Seems like I'd get my chance to make it up after all.

Now if I could just get this pesky night time over with.

* * *

I'd figured, sometime a few hours ago in my not sleeping, that 7am would be okay. He might be up at 7am on a Saturday morning, right? He was a teacher. As far as I knew, they did crazy things like that - although my knowledge of teacher-related things was limited to whatever cliché was bandied around in my youth. But still. Seven sounded good to me right now. And seven, most importantly, was only four minutes away.

I was lying on my side, utterly still by now. The rough hotel bedspread was twisted under me after a whole night of shifty restlessness, and I was wearing the same clothes as the night before. In fact I hadn't moved from the bed at all since I'd found Spike's phone number. Instead, I'd stared at the ceiling until morning light crept across it. By now I was sick of the sight of this room. I was staring intently at the red numbers of the alarm clock, inches from my face, phone number memorized right next to his complete address and how he smelled.

It's this kind of thinking that got me in trouble in the first place.

T-minus one minute. Sixty seconds, and I had better drag the phone right here in bed with me so I could reach for it the second I allowed myself to.

Wait.

What kind of crazy-ass thing was this? I wasn't diffusing a bomb, I was calling a guy. I'd called thousands of guys before. Very few of which I had feelings for, but we could just stick a pin in that for now. I grabbed the phone off its hooks seconds before the numbers turned to 7:00, and dialed the number, sombering up rather quickly.

Time to grovel. Or something. Was groveling even in anymore?

The rings grated at the inside of my head, and every time they stopped I almost hung up. I swear I was about to do it when the ringing stopped and I heard a faint click followed by a quiet:

"Hmgh?"

Huh? I squinted. "Spike?"

I heard the sound of fabric ruffling around, and he coughed away from the handset. His voice came back groggy and slightly disoriented. "Xander?"

I twisted my finger around the phone cord nervously. "Yeah, um, hi. It's me."

There's another long pause. Then, "You called."

"I said I would..."

"Yeah, well..."

This time the pause was awkward, but I was determined to get through this even if I had to walk on coals doing it. "So... Your ex-wife. Liz. She's really nice."

"Yeah... yes, she is."

"When, when did you two meet?" We could pretend we were back into our catching-up mode. It had worked fine the night before; we were getting pretty good at it, too.

"Oh, we... I met her at school. She, she does a lot of research at the library there."

"Yeah? She teaches too?"

"No no, she's an art historian. Mostly she's a dealer. But she was writing her doctoral thesis, so she was there a lot."

"Wow. People actually do that for real?"

Spike laughed lightly. "Her family is quite well-off. She could've done anything she wanted. She loves art so much... she has this uncanny knack for what she does." There was something in his voice, something about herat mat made something in my belly flip nervously. I ignored it the best I could.

"How long have you been, um... divorced?"

"Three years now."

"You seem close."

"We are. The split was amicable. Basically we realised we liked each other too much to be married to each other..." He paused and laughed weakly. "Does that make sense?"

I smiled a bit. "I think it does."

"She's the best thing that happened to me, Xander. After? When I got here? Took me a while, but then I found her and everything was better."

I nodded. Somehow, I could imagine how that felt. "Does she know about..." The demon thing. Because if she did and she still stuck around, she deserved some kind of medal. And a hug.

"Yes, Liz knows. I told her. I had to. It still haunted me, it didn't seem fair to hide it from her." I heard what sounded like the creak of bedsprings. "It wasn't easy, not exactly something you bring up over a light lunch. 'By the way, I used to ne one of the undead. Pass the bruschetta.' But I did."

I was breathless. Didn't even want to think how hard that must've been. The thought of scaring away someone you care so much about. "How did she react?"

Spike laughed. "Well, she stared at me over her tempura, then she picked up her jacket and walked out. I didn't hear of her for two weeks. Then she came back and we moved in together."

"Wow."

"Yeah. She's incredible. She's... my anchor. And she gave me Julian," he added, pride ringing clear in his voice.

"How..." I wasn't sure what I was asking, here. I stared at my free hand. "How does that feel? Being a father?"

"It's like nothing you've ever experienced, Xander. And I've been through a lot. It's the hardest yet most rewarding thing I've ever done. It's..." His voice got quieter, and I heard him get up, heard the cracking of the hardwood under his feet. "It's something I never ever thought I'd get to have, you know?"

"He looks just like you," I added timidly, heart swelling with something unidentifiable at the love his words contained. I wanted to hear it again.

But he didn't speak for a moment, and I listened to him move around the room, stalling. When he spoke again, he sounded a lot closer, and that took me off-guard.

"I'm sorry that I didn't tell you about them, Xander..."

"It's okay," I breathed out.

"No, I mean... I didn't know, I mean, this is hard enough as it is, I wasn't trying to hide anything..."

"It... It is hard," I confessed. "Not just the kid, the wife thing, but - the whole thing." Where did that come from? I did not just hint at wanting to discuss feelings. Oh, hell.

"I know." More pacing on his end, maybe the sound of him taking off his t-shirt. "I know." He was as lost as I was. He cleared his throat. "This isn't how I meant for things to go, I didn't expect you to come out, I mean, I thought, maybe, I just wanted you to know that I was, that--" his voice trailed off and I swallowed. Hard.

I didn't say anything for a long while. I was staring at the ceiling again, but not really seeing it. "I'm... I'm glad you wrote..." I murmured.

He stopped moving, and his breathing came to my ear more loudly, a bit out of whack. "You are?" Christ, how could two words contain so much? His tone was clouded with several emotions I couldn't quite deciph

"Yeah, I... I hadn't thought of you in years, I really hadn't, well maybe in passing, but... Spike, we all thought you were dead." I didn't mean the last bit of that to come out strangled. I hadn't done all this in too long.

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have written. It was better that you thought that, it's, I wanted, I couldn't let you think--" I heard a loud thump. It sounded almost like something hit a wall. I heard a loud inhala of of breath and then his voice, firm now, strong, determined, and completely miserable. "Xander. I'm sorry. I can't do this. I shouldn't have written. I'm sorry you came all the way out here. Don't worry, I won't bother you again."

Ouch. That hurt. What about the kiss? I never thought he'd just want to go back to how things were... Agh, I didn't know what to think. Suddenly I panicked. I gripped the handset tighter. "Wait, no. That's not... I'm glad you wrote. It came out of nowhere and it took me a while to accept that you were around still, but... I came out here because..." Gah. Words? Please? Actual sentences? "Look, I'd like to see you again. Last night was... It was nice. Really really nice. And I feel like shit that I bailed on you like that. I just... It was a lot to take all at once, and the kiss, it..."

"Don't apologize, I understand." A low chuckle and god that sound was so familiar it hurt. "I would have done the same thing." A moment's pause, then so quietly I almost didn't hear it. "And I'm glad I kissed you."

I grinned. "Yeah?"

"Oh hell yeah." I could hear the shy smile in his voice.

I just stared at the ceiling some more, grinning like an idiot and feeling like my lottery numbers had just come up. "So, um, I can see you again?" And I heard my voice crack just like when I was thirteen. I didn't know it could still do that. It was good to know.

"If you like." His voice cracked too, and the grin stretched even wider. Ow, my face.

"I leave Sunday morning..." Tomorrow.

"Well, I guess, it's what? Eight, nine o'clock?"

I grinned. "I'm on my way."
- 7
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Dancing About Architecture